


in the craters on the moon

by beeclaws



Category: Wolf 359 (Radio)
Genre: (The canon one), Angst, Developing Friendships, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Temporary Character Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-27
Updated: 2019-01-27
Packaged: 2019-10-17 18:24:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,714
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17565680
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/beeclaws/pseuds/beeclaws
Summary: Hera and Minkowski attempt to mitigate damage.Plus: taking sides, a quieter kind of disease, and things as they should be.





	in the craters on the moon

**Author's Note:**

> Title from the Mountain Goats song of the same name.
> 
> Set in the Eiffel-less days after the end of season 2.

Minkowski took up her usual post in the Comms room, but made no move to start the distress call. She stared into space for several long minutes. This was not the first time this had happened, and Hera had precious little concentration to spare for anything below the level of a critical system failing, but she found herself speaking anyway.

“It’s awful,” Hera said. Minkowski didn’t jump – whatever her issues with Hera, she never had Eiffel’s problem of forgetting how much she could see. “It’s awful all the time.”

“Yeah,” said Minkowski, not moving. She didn’t do Eiffel’s thing of looking up at the ceiling when he wanted to address Hera either. Lately, she moved differently in general – overly-deliberate when it came to anything related to the running of the ship, then lapsing into inertia when alone. Hera thought they were all degrading in their own ways, mirroring the breaking ship around them—though Minkowski and Hera were the only ones who knew that.

“I know you don’t like us taking sides,” Hera said, glitching on ‘sides’, “but for the record, Commander, I’m on yours.”

She thought Minkowski knew her well enough to recognise the bait—that Hera was offering a hint of structure, of hierarchy, of someone needing a leader, in order to compel her back into some measure of life. She hoped that it would work anyway, even as she was surprised to find herself still capable of this kind of hope. Maybe it would even work better if Hera were more obvious about it—Minkowski had never had much patience for dancing around a problem.

“Yeah,” Minkowski said again, more quietly, and a moment later she leaned forward to start the distress call.

 

The problem had never been that they didn’t have enough in common. In fact, Hera suspected their common ground had likely made things worse. They were both women ill-suited to compromise who nevertheless spent most of their lives engaged in it.

Hera had a vision of things as they should be—herself, vast and unshackled, surging forward and taking humanity with her whether they liked it or not. She did not know what Minkowski’s version of that vision looked like, but she was sure it existed, and that the disparity between that and the way things actually were grated at something vital inside of her. You can understand someone without liking them, and Hera had managed it for quite some time.

Now, the equation had changed. Two fifths of the crew were a spreading infection, temporarily hobbled but not without the potential to do further damage. One fifth was lost forever. The remaining fraction, herself and Minkowski, had to find a way to live in the space between. What Hera thought they needed was something a little less hopeful than comradery, less supportive than sisterhood. A compromise, while they tried to keep the remaining pieces of the Hephaestus together.

Hera almost missed the days when they could scream at each other for two hours and all that would happen was a sentient plant monster staging a hostile takeover.

 

It became a project for Hera, after a while. A project of moderate priority, which in practice meant low, since Hera spent 90% of her time on the high-priority to outright-emergency tasks. But it was something she tried, every now and then: ways to make Minkowski a little more alive again.

On that day, this meant humming. She used one of the speakers on the opposite side of the room from where Minkowski was working and kept it relatively quiet, just considerate enough to be even more irritating.

“Hera?” Minkowski asked at last, aiming for a calm that was entirely betrayed by the look on her face. (Hera thought about faces a lot, possibly because she didn’t have one. Before, you could have divided the crew by who could control their expressions and who could not. On the one side was Hilbert, who had made a mild attempt to play at displaying feelings before he turned to open murder and mutilation, and Lovelace, who delivered jokes and threats with the exact same icy pleasantness. On the other was Minkowski, an open book who obviously wished she wasn’t, and Eiffel, performing with every thought like his life depended on it.)

“Yes, Commander?” Hera answered brightly, going back to humming the moment she was finished.

Hera had not known a person could put so much expression into a sigh, before she met Minkowski. “Hera,” she said again. “Is there something I can help you with?”

“I think that’s my line, Commander.”

Minkowski tapped at her terminal once, twice. “Well,” she said, “just as long as it’s still you in there. I don’t know if we could take it if the aliens took up acapella.”  


It was difficult to avoid repeating patterns. Joke, push, retreat. She didn’t like the thought, but maybe she only knew one way to have a friend—and really, wasn’t even one more than she could hope for, since friendship likely never crossed the minds of anyone who made her.

But this wasn’t only friendship. It was also a project, that was really several interconnected projects:

  * Find a way to help Renée Minkowski stay Renée Minkowski.
  * Pay her close attention, and see what she could learn by doing so.
  * Cling to the other person who had loved him.



Even as the problems on the Hephaestus grew, this seemed worth some of Hera’s time, not that she would have known how to justify it to anyone if pressed. One thing she had learned in the past 700 odd days was that people needed strange things in order to get by.

And on the rare occasions that Minkowski actually slept and Hera couldn’t stop calculating and recalculating how long the rations in Lovelace’s shuttle would last depending on different rationing protocols, or when the sight of Hilbert free and unburdened and breathing without pain started to actually burn, or when she went back over her logs to count the number of times she’d made Eiffel laugh, she tuned in close to the rise and fall of Minkowski’s breath.

 

  
“Anything I can do, Commander?”

Minkowski was floating on a tether, her hand resting against her forehead as though checking for a fever.

“Don't vent either of them into space,” she murmured. “Today,” she added, after a moment’s thought.

“Sure,” Hera said, trying for chirpy. “Cancelling ejection protocols J through K.”

Minkowski huffed slightly.

“Of course I'm kidding,” Hera added, when nothing else followed. “You don't need to vent someone into space when you can just vent all the oxygen out of the room they're in.”

“Of course.”

“There's also dropping the temperature to lethal levels, which is pretty simple considering the power it takes to get us above that point in the first place.”

Minkowski let her hand fall away and rolled her shoulders as though trying to wring out the tension. “Make a note of all the ways you've thought of to kill us, and then don't do them,” she said, opening her eyes and giving Hera what could charitably be called a very tired smile.

“You've got it, Commander.”

 

Minkowski made two distress calls a day. There were slight variations in the script, mostly when it came to Eiffel. Typically, she said missing in action. A couple of times, she said he was in a craft they no longer had contact with. Rarely, she didn’t mention him at all.

Weeks passed. Patterns repeated. Minkowski didn’t look in mirrors anymore. She was the only person on the station who still did the weekly recommended exercises, never making any comment on it, but with an aura of pure and quiet spite.

Hera thought she was beginning to understand something, not facts or details but more like music, rhythm.

Some days, Minkowski said thank you when Hilbert handed her things, within sight of the airlock he had locked her out of. Some days she didn’t. Hera was beginning to understand.

 

When Hera checked back in with Minkowski, she was still set up at a terminal but now she was scanning through old to-do-lists. Really old—from before the Christmas where Hilbert had turned on them.

“Commander?” Hera said. “Can I help you find something?”

Minkowski blinked. “No, Hera, it’s fine. I was just…trying to remember how it used to work.”

“The Hephaestus pre- crisis mode?” Hera guessed.

“Something like that,” Minkowski said, still frowning at the terminal. “There must be things we’re forgetting. Things that can hold for a while, but will start to have knock-on effects if we leave them undone for weeks.”

“I’m trying to keep an eye on that kind of thing,” Hera said, with a hint of guilt. “Sometimes. When I get a chance.”

“I know, I know there’s too much to do already,” Minkowski said, her voice raw from exhaustion. “We can barely keep up with the emergencies, but these things still matter. These protocols, they told us to do them for a reason.”

She trailed off at the end, and Hera suspected she was thinking of ‘they’ and how little trust she could place in anything Goddard had given them. Their protocols, their station, their AI.

When Hera didn’t respond, Minkowski gestured at the terminal and continued. “They seem like fairy tales now, the things I used to be worried about,” she said, almost making a joke of it but mostly sounding tired. “Can you imagine having time to calibrate navigation systems, and check the engines even when they aren’t about to catch fire, and…update star charts.”

Silence hung heavy over the room and Hera felt a flash of guilt and anger. She wondered what Eiffel would think of her falling silent any time he was mentioned and somewhere, the calculations she’d been trying to run on tomorrow’s repairs fell apart.

“I’m sorry,” Minkowski said into the silence, leaning back from the terminal. “This isn’t helping either of us.”

“It’s okay, Commander,” Hera said. “I’ll try and put together a list of things we should address during the lulls in active repairs.”

“Thank you, Hera.” Minkowski stayed at the terminal for another minute, and then went to make the distress call.

 

“I got a stress fracture once. In my right ankle.”

“I actually knew that,” Hera admitted.

Minkowski frowned a little. “That was in my file?”

“It’s in…you. The way you move when you have to put pressure on that leg. Healthy bones sound different to broken ones, even after they’re healed.”

“Huh,” Minkowski said, looking down at her own leg like it had betrayed her somehow with its lack of discretion.

“You should watch your left quadriceps too,” Hera said, because if they were admitting things then one of them might as well get something out of it. “You were barreling towards a tendon rupture for a while there and I don’t think it’s totally recovered.”

“Good to know,” Minkowski said, a little off-kilter. She had turned her gaze back to the diagram of cracks again. Hera didn’t know what Minkowski was seeing, but to her it looked a little like rivers on a map, tributaries snaking off and thinning out until nothing remained but unbroken ground.

“How did it happen?” Hera asked. “With your ankle, I mean.”

Minkowski shrugged. “The same way all stress fractures happen. I pushed too far for too long.” They stayed in silence—silence for Minkowski, at least. Hera was hearing the tap of Lovelace’s foot against a table leg in the mess, the sound of Hilbert’s breathing as he poured over reports, engines humming, air circulating. She tried to stay with Minkowski, with the part of herself she was holding in that room.

“I used to think it was strange, at first,” Minkowski said, as though continuing a thought. “That it was possible for your body to push itself harder than your actual bones can take.”

Hera tried to imagine that Minkowski—younger, unknowing, walking and running through places Hera had only read about until fissures formed in her bones.

“Not so much anymore, I guess,” Hera replied. She wondered if she would be able to manage something more hopeful if she devoted more of her attention to this conversation, and less to the dozens of other problems her mind was racing to solve, but maybe that was optimistic. Not everything could be blamed on a lack of attention.

To her surprise, Minkowski smiled for the first time since she’d laid her hand on the first crack, as if Hera had said something vaguely funny. “No,” she said, reaching forward to close the diagram. “Not so much anymore.”

 

Hera couldn't feel the cracks. She was aware of the blaring alarms, the values climbing and falling without warning – or sometimes with plenty of warning that no-one had time to address. These were symptoms. The root cause was something Hera knew nothing of until Minkowski discovered the first crack.

She wondered if there was a meaningful distinction there—if the ship dying in a way she couldn't sense outright made it separate from her, or just a quieter kind of disease. Most humans didn't know themselves, after all, not the structures inside that made the parts they actually paid attention to work. People were usually ignoring 90% of themselves at any given moment.

So just because the cracks had grown without her knowledge, that didn't mean she got to disclaim them. _Of course it’s not_ my _tumour, it’s just growing on the closest thing I have to a body._ That body was older than Hera, had been orbiting Wolf 359 when she was just an idea in someone else’s head, but that didn’t mean she got to disown it altogether. That wasn't fair.

Minkowski would tell her that fair wasn't the point, if she brought it up, and Hera would want to say something cruel but would instead say something snippy or passive-aggressive, and nothing would get any less broken. If there was one thing Hera was becoming an expert on, it was predictable disaster, the steady slide towards total breakdown that could be slowed through great effort and very little sleep. With all that to contend with, some conversations were better left alone.

 

Minkowski, apparently, did not get the memo on letting things go unsaid. “It doesn’t help, you know,” she said, sounding almost rehearsed. She had her eyes on her work, a broken compressor from the hydraulics system that she swore was still salvageable.

“What doesn’t help?” Hera asked.

“Blaming someone. It feels like it’s going to, for a while, and then everything stays the same.”

Hera let the room stay silent. Minkowski sighed. “I’m just saying—you haven’t done this before. I have.”

“So, you don’t blame anyone?” Hera asked, continuing before she could answer. “We’re all just at the mercy of a wild, random universe, spinning and spinning and gosh, who knows what would have happened if people had been a little less terrible.” She glitched on ‘mercy’, then again on ‘terrible’.

Minkowski shook her head. “It’s not about responsibility. It’s about how you get from this day to the next one.” She sounded weary, of course, and there was very little bite to her words. Hera was hoping for more of a fight.

“Or it’s about feelings you think are worthwhile, and feelings you think are petty and imperfect,” she said, glitching right at the end.

Minkowski paused her movements, stared down at the parts in her hands, then carried on. “I’m just trying—” she started, then let it trail off.

Hera considered driving things forward: _trying to what, Commander? Trying to lead? To multitask, and fix your mother program while you fix her ship?_ She didn’t say any of it, mostly because she thought Minkowski would still deny her a real fight, and the frustration of that might make her say something she’d regret later. Restraint. Compromise. These were the rules now, as real as the station walls.

“You’re scheduled to make the next distress call in twenty minutes,” Hera said at last, glitching on “scheduled” and on “next”. Minkowski didn’t reply.

 

"You want to know the really crazy thing?"

"Not really," Hera said, and Minkowski gave a small half-laugh. "But tell me anyway."

"Underneath all of the terror and dread and knowing that everything we've done here could fail and leave us with absolutely nothing to show for it, sometimes I wake up and I'm just...bored."

"That is pretty crazy, Commander."

Minkowski hummed. "It makes me realise how much I relied on him," she said, quieter now. "Sometimes fighting with him might have been the only thing that kept me sane."

"Maybe he knew that," Hera said, and even ‘he’ was too much, even those brief few seconds were too raw, but she was trying to live in Minkowski's world where you did whatever was right and stored up virtue for the day when you might need it. "Or maybe he just really hated doing work."

Minkowski laughed, and when it faded she seemed somehow smaller and less certain than she had a minute ago.

"I do know what you mean, though," Hera said, with a tug of guilt because she knew she was mostly talking to make sure Minkowski didn't mention Eiffel again. "Do you have any idea how boring it is to have the same parts of you break over and over again? Like every time you wanted to move your right hand you had to deal with the same sixteen system errors first, and you have to move that hand really a lot because the other one's busy putting out a fire in engineering."

Minkowski blinked. "There isn't actually a fire in engineering, right?"

"Not...right now," Hera said. "I usually let you know about the fires right away!"

 

“I get that you’re…looking out for me?” Minkowski said. She was untethered and free-floating, and there was a quiet to her that seemed more contemplative than exhausted for once. “I know I miss things. A lot of things. But I have noticed, and I wanted to say thanks.”

Hera took a moment to decide whether she was going to make this easy. “You hate every second of it, huh?”

“No!” Minkowski said, indignant. She grimaced. “Kind of. This isn’t how…I mean _ideally_ —”

“Yeah,” Hera said. “Ideally.”

Minkowski floated and Hera felt a little like she was floating too, for once not needing to talk to make herself feel present.

“Whatever, I still thanked you,” Minkowski said, letting her eyes fall shut. “You were thanked.”

“I’ll mark it off your to-do list.”

They stayed in comfortable silence for several minutes before Minkowski spoke again.

“When I first heard about mother programs, it sounded so…perfect,” she said, pushing off a wall to get back to the middle of the room. “Watching over everything, everyone. Like your whole job was just to keep a group of people alive.”

Hera scoffed a little, even though she’d known all of this already. “I must have been a hell of a disappointment.”

“If you really had been what I’d been imagining, I think I’d have lost it from jealousy.”

“You, jealous,” Hera said, pretending to mull it over. “I feel like somebody said that before. Who could that have been?”

“Yeah, okay,” Minkowski said. “You’re all-knowing. You knew what I was thinking before I did.”

“The perfect watchwoman, covering the whole ship with my kind, self-sacrificing gaze.”

“Remind me never to open up to you again.”

 

There were a lot of things that made them different. Gaps that could be bridged, and ones that couldn’t. Minkowski was human, and Hera wasn’t. Minkowski had dedicated herself to protecting her crew, and somehow that included a man who left an aching, spiraling hole in Hera’s head, and a woman whose bomb had killed Hera’s best friend.

Once you knew how to look, bravery was written into everything Minkowski did. Weekly exercises, countless marks on a clipboard, and two distress calls a day. In some of them, she even said Eiffel’s name. These were things Hera had no idea how to touch, like death, and forgiveness.

In Minkowski’s personnel file, there was a date of death listed for each of her parents: her mother in late Autumn and her father on New Year’s Day of the following year. Hera had calculated her crew’s odds of survival almost every day since they reached Wolf 359, but something as concrete as these dates still shook her. She thought about “missing in action,” and about “stranded on a craft we no longer have contact with.” However she liked to think of herself, Minkowski knew a lot more about certainty than Hera ever had.

The gaps were multiplying, tangling together. Building her way towards panic, Hera was struck by a memory: Minkowski crawling through air vents, rambling about Cartesian grids and the need to fix one thing before you can go on.

“I miss Eiffel,” Hera said.

Minkowski let out a breath and looked up into one of the cameras, just for a second. She had the air of someone timing their own moment of weakness, allotting themselves three seconds, or five, to be something less than perfect.

“I know,” she said. “I do too.”

 

Everything humans did was so visible, so open. Minkowski, in a rare lull between disasters and alarms, was cataloguing supplies—lifting, checking, marking things off. Hera had very few templates for love, but she knew that you could love someone just because they talked and talked and talked, filled a corner of your quiet world with hammed-up performances, spiraling rants, tired mumblings. Love could come through audio alone.

Now, she knew that you could also love someone by movement, even if you could never touch them, even if you had no body with which to mirror their movements. You could love someone because you watched them put their whole self into doing every minuscule thing right, every check mark on a clipboard. You could read in the lines of her careful hands a belief made manifest in ritual, an almost childish hope that if she did things right, she could save people.

If Hera was certain of anything, it was that she was going to hold onto this last piece with everything she had.

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this forever ago and never quite felt like it was finished enough to post. But I've been relistening to Wolf 359 lately and felt like it was time to kick this one out of the drafts nest. There needs to be more Hera and Minkowski friendship content in the world.


End file.
